Wilson Harris - The Carnival Trilogy

The intricacy of all these relationships, their fullness, their abbreviated texture, their half-eclipsed initial capacity in the riddle of the crab at death’s door was not entirely lost upon Sir Thomas. He recalled his desire to sculpt Aunt Alice when she danced for her daylight supper. Curious to think of one destitute old woman, Bartleby’s third wife, as a dancer (the dancer who knighted him), and the other, the well-to-do second wife, as riveted by pride into the Market-place. Was Alice the fleet spirit, Charlotte the chained, despite her fortune and her privileges? Were the spectral voices of caution HE SAYS, SHE SAYS, contours of oblivion sprung from the blind collision of cultures but heard rather than seen in the voice of the mask, the conscience of the mask?

*

Sir Thomas fell for the marble woman. Her dark folk-humour, dark folk-conscience, thrilled him. He faintly worshipped her. He was wet not dry puberty. He wished he were ancient, at least one hundred years old, a twenty-first century fully grown knight in saintly, sexual armour. Her intervention in the Market theatre, the applause she received, sprang to his head like wine. In the day’s journey — it seemed a whole day, an age — across New Forest, he had been uneasy at times as they made their way along East Street and Brickdam. But now it was as if she swallowed him. He felt the poignant sweetness that an older woman brings to a young lover who has arrived at the precocious puberty of the twentieth-century colonial age and is suddenly enamoured by the touch of exploited flesh-and-blood that consumes him yet enlivens him unexpectedly.

He resented the czar. How old was the idiot giant anyway? Old as Carnival? Old as Everyman Masters’ shadow-resemblance falling everywhere? Masters’ shadow-resemblance had been cut from a true mask that must of necessity be cut again and again, hewn again and again into glimmering configurations, false, true, truer still, truest still, less false, less true, voice of the hidden true mask, voice of the hidden true conscience of the mask everywhere in everything, however true, however less than true, however inferior, devilish, apparently untrue everything seems. This (or all these) fell not only upon Masters’ lame kin Flatfoot Johnny but upon lame bureaucrats, lame governors of the estate of New Forest, lame field-marshals who had fought for land in South America, lame clerks and administrators.

The mask that fell of necessity varied in cut but its gift to Carnival was the hidden voice, the evolving conscience, the hidden contour heard rather than seen in every cruel or other circumstance.

Indeed that hidden contour, that paradox of a mask, fell upon me as well for I was Everyman Masters’ spirit-clerk (as well as parent-spark) in writing his life. I was the clerk of a master-being, some would say, but in concert with lame plantation bureaucrats that he overshadowed and resembled, I was the clerk of tyranny or of a tyranny of sorts. Not only that. His familiarity — from the time he was seventeen or eighteen — with the women of the plantation with whom he slept (as is the privilege and custom of apprentice-overseers/princes of the estate) signified a tradition of intercourse between high and low that I deplored but profited from myself as a young man, a young clerk with money in his pocket. In writing of all this, am I the clerk of tradition or the clerk of a fallacy of tradition that resembles true tradition?

All this helps to give luminous masked age or Carnival tradition to Thomas and the marble woman as they make their way — as they guide me — through past, present and future labyrinth from the czar’s Market-place to Crocodile Bridge.

The bone-littered path they took ran no longer with the wounded ease, the plastered ease, of Brickdam or East Street proprieties. It crackled underfoot with the malady of the caves of the plantation primitive. The tenements or caves were flat and squat. All well and good for missionaries in the Inferno to speak of a good soul or a bad soul, a good meal or a bad meal, or of the devil’s plantation repast, but one was equally held by windows and doors that yawned silently, whose maw seemed capable of swallowing millions, maw or spiked cannon, the uneasy peace in which poverty makes its nest.

Did tenement caves and spiked cannon glimmer with forgotten battlefields as the inmates of the plantation ghetto moved against windows and doors of the setting sun, or were they the green/rotting nurseries of future wars, future abortive revolutions, future czars?

The grotesqueries that were beginning to arise in the return of the dead king of Carnival into my dreams, into my book, were becoming manifest, if I may so put it, in their intricate assault upon my complacency.

I recalled the barred mask of the sun upon Thomas’s face (with its spidery, half-abbreviated, half-obliterated segmented features in other Thomases around incarnations of history around the globe) as he peered at Aunt Alice through the gate of the Alms House. Not a barred gate but the blind mouth and deaf eyes and hollow ears of cannon lay upon dead Masters as he prompted me to visualize the neighbourhood through which Thomas and the marble woman walked — not upon Christ’s metaphysical sea where floated the vessel of Night but upon a daemonic (true? untrue?) globe I thought I knew but scarcely knew at all in its parallel incarnations of deed and reflection.

Masters wanted me to reflect upon a deed or a blow that is enigmatic in substance; it appears spiked or obsolescent, it appears an anachronism, but in inner bombardment or inner strike it is as unexpected as the green lightning of explosive fertility in a rotting garden. Even so I was still unprepared for the dead king’s confession. “As a Boy of seventeen,” he cried with the bone of a woman in the masked aperture of his mouth, a bone that descended into the beam of his body, “I came to this rotting neighbourhood and ate a woman twice my age.” He was laughing soundlessly. “She was — how do the glossy magazines put it? — soul food, soul-sex. It was nothing. I felt … What did I feel? I felt the spring of action that fires itself so reflexively, with such puppet ardour; it is as old as the hills, it is nothing. I was an apprentice-overseer, an apprentice-knight or king or what have you, a mask is a mask is a mask, of the globe. And she was marble one enters like eggshell.”

“You felt nothing?” I pressed him. I felt guilt. As a Boy of eighteen whose age lapses into many vicarious bodies (all self-made heroes in the 1920s, 1930s, Depression cinema were cosmetic overseers, they were the Boys), I had slept for the first time with a woman twice my age. She was a subtle whore with the eyes of black-blooded, tailored actresses. I had felt something, I had heard the hidden voice (the unseen companion) of Masters’ guilt. Masters had felt nothing, he had blanketed my conscience, my calloused conscience, so woven into the apparent indifference of unseen populations, it had seemed nothing whereas I knew it was something. I had felt perverse guilt and pride at the box-office money I paid her to lie with me in bed under a screen concealing spiked cannon, perverse pride and guilt at traditions of the hunt, half-male hunted, half-female huntress. It was the sense of being torn into two or three or four, into trinities, quaternities, that left me fulfilled but profoundly unhappy, proud but shattered within. Masters looked into my heart and read my mind; he saw the paradoxes of something and nothing, unfelt yet felt, the shadow of divine clerk within me, within parchment biography of spirit. I was the clerk of bone and dagger, inanimate/animate soul. I was the clerk of god. I was possessed by the necessity to endure the mystery of truth, the mystery of hell.